Subscription Lists

How often when speaking to someone do you embellish and exaggerate what you are saying, for effect?

Regardless of what you are saying, important or unimportant, do you sometimes embellish for effect, wanting to impress or draw unnatural attention to yourself, making you feel good about yourself?

Not long ago I wondered just how often I had done this, without realizing it. As I began to recall past conversations and visits with people in my life, I saw a flaw in my character. It did not look very pretty. Human nature had for a moment taken over while believing I should tell someone I was praying for them.

"Pride had budded."

I shuttered to think just how often I had done this automatically. I had become more self-serving than serving. Vanity and pride had taken over without me realizing it. I asked Jesus Christ to forgive me, and help me to be aware and resist such in the future.

Perhaps on reflection you can remember something in your life that is similar.

What we say, in principle, may be true. But we decorate what we say with adjectives, and expletives that draw unnatural attention to ourselves. Without realizing it, our embellishment makes what we have said as much a lie as it is truth.

This can provoke untrue beliefs and more favorable attention to us by what we have said. In doing this, it makes us look better in the eyes of those who hear us.

But should awareness of others that we are praying for them always be concealed?

No.

There are many occasions and many relationships with others when, by telling them that you are praying for them (if you really do and if it is sincere), is an encouragement to those you are praying for.

Their awareness that we are praying for them, whatever provokes us to pray for them, can strengthen their faith in God. It can encourage them to endure that which God has allowed in their lives. There are unlimited things that cause discouragement and a weakening of faith in those we are praying for.

Their knowing that you pray for them because you, as well as God, really care for them!

Let your statements to others that you are praying for them be honest, not self exalting, not spoken to elevate self, but spoken only so that the one spoken to may be comforted and increase in faith.

Otherwise, your promise to pray for them, or that you are praying for them, could be more about how you look to them than how much you care for them.

Be sure that in telling them you are praying for them that it will encourage them. and be sure in your own heart and mind that you are not informing them for your own self aggrandizement.

"He that toots his own horn, blows his reward". - Author Unknown

"A man's pride brings him low, but he who is of a humble spirit will obtain honor" - Proverbs 29:23 (AMP)

"Today's Little Lift" from Jim Bullington

Mercy and not Sacrifice (Sept. 30, 2010)